For four of the past five years, MBA students from the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah have competed in the final round of the Adobe Analytics Challenge.
In that same period, students from the Eccles School have brought home the top prize twice. This year, Eccles Full-Time MBA students Izzy Beh, Jhana Aristondo, and Miranda Dennett took 4th place, especially significant considering that there were more than 1,600 teams that participated.
The Adobe Analytics Challenge is an analytics-focused business case competition where students are challenged to use Adobe’s analytics products to solve real-world problems for a client. After more than 15 years of competitions, Adobe opened the competition to international schools for the first time in 2020. Apart from the University of Utah, finalists for this year’s competition included teams from Chicago Booth, UCLA, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), Indian Institute of Technology, and the National University of Singapore.
Teams were given a key business problem and large sets of real-world data from Nike and asked to analyze the problem and provide opportunities for business improvement using Adobe’s products. The key to success doesn’t solely lie in understanding the analytics, however, as the University of Utah team (nicknamed Just U It) demonstrated.
“This experience really solidified my love for using data and storytelling to articulate strategic business decisions,” says MBA candidate Miranda Dennett (‘22).
This year, more than 1,600 teams from across the globe entered the competition, five of which came from the Eccles School Full-Time MBA program. Selected individuals from the challenge will be given the opportunity to interview for internships and full-time positions with both Adobe and Nike. Additionally, $60,000 in cash prizes were awarded to the finalists.
To learn more, please visit adobeanalyticschallenge.com.